Convert JSON to XML in Python

I see a number of questions on SO asking about ways to convert XML to JSON, but I’m interested in going the other way. Is there a python library for converting JSON to XML?

Edit: Nothing came back right away, so I went ahead and wrote a script that solves this problem.

Python already allows you to convert from JSON into a native dict (using json or, in versions < 2.6, simplejson), so I wrote a library that converts native dicts into an XML string.

https://github.com/quandyfactory/dict2xml

It supports int, float, boolean, string (and unicode), array and dict data types and arbitrary nesting (yay recursion).

I’ll post this as an answer once 8 hours have passed.

Answers:

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Method 1

Nothing came back right away, so I went ahead and wrote a script that solves this problem.

Python already allows you to convert from JSON into a native dict (using json or, in versions < 2.6, simplejson), so I wrote a library that converts native dicts into an XML string.

https://github.com/quandyfactory/dict2xml

It supports int, float, boolean, string (and unicode), array and dict data types and arbitrary nesting (yay recursion).

Method 2

Load it into a dict using json.loads then use anything from this question…

Serialize Python dictionary to XML

Method 3

If you don’t have such a package, you can try:

def json2xml(json_obj, line_padding=""):
    result_list = list()

    json_obj_type = type(json_obj)

    if json_obj_type is list:
        for sub_elem in json_obj:
            result_list.append(json2xml(sub_elem, line_padding))

        return "n".join(result_list)

    if json_obj_type is dict:
        for tag_name in json_obj:
            sub_obj = json_obj[tag_name]
            result_list.append("%s<%s>" % (line_padding, tag_name))
            result_list.append(json2xml(sub_obj, "t" + line_padding))
            result_list.append("%s</%s>" % (line_padding, tag_name))

        return "n".join(result_list)

    return "%s%s" % (line_padding, json_obj)

For example:

s='{"main" : {"aaa" : "10", "bbb" : [1,2,3]}}'
j = json.loads(s)
print(json2xml(j))

Result:

<main>
        <aaa>
                10
        </aaa>
        <bbb>
                1
                2
                3
        </bbb>
</main>

Method 4

Use dicttoxml to convert JSON directly to XML

Installation
pip install dicttoxml
or
easy_install dicttoxml

In [2]: from json import loads

In [3]: from dicttoxml import dicttoxml

In [4]: json_obj = '{"main" : {"aaa" : "10", "bbb" : [1,2,3]}}'

In [5]: xml = dicttoxml(loads(json_obj))

In [6]: print(xml)
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" ?><root><main type="dict"><aaa type="str">10</aaa><bbb type="list"><item type="int">1</item><item type="int">2</item><item type="int">3</item></bbb></main></root>

In [7]: xml = dicttoxml(loads(json_obj), attr_type=False)

In [8]: print(xml)
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" ?><root><main><aaa>10</aaa><bbb><item>1</item><item>2</item><item>3</item></bbb></main></root>

For more information on dicttoxml

Method 5

I found xmltodict to be useful. Looks like it was released after some of the posts here. https://pypi.org/project/xmltodict/

import xmltodict
import json
sample_json = {"note": {"to": "Tove", "from": "Jani", "heading": "Reminder", "body": "Don't forget me this weekend!"}}
#############
#json to xml
#############
json_to_xml = xmltodict.unparse(sample_json)
print(json_to_xml)
#############
#xmlto json
#############
x_to_j_dict = xmltodict.parse(json_to_xml)
x_to_j_string = json.dumps(x_to_j_dict)
back_to_json = json.loads(x_to_j_string)
print(back_to_json)

Method 6

from json import loads
from dicttoxml import dicttoxml

s='{"main" : {"aaa" : "10", "bbb" : [1,2,3]}}'
xml = dicttoxml(loads(s))

Or if your data is stored in a pandas data.frame as mine often is:

df['xml'] = df['json'].apply(lambda s: dicttoxml(json.loads(s))

All methods was sourced from stackoverflow.com or stackexchange.com, is licensed under cc by-sa 2.5, cc by-sa 3.0 and cc by-sa 4.0